Sci-fi and Fantasy Movie and Series Reviews, Part 17

The Secret of NIMH
Leading with the best, again! But not just the best of the batch, but the best of all time. Don Bluth’s all-hand-drawn masterpiece about a widowed field mouse, her sick son, and her discovery of super smart rats who figured out how to use (steal) electricity, and their Amulet of Concentrated Awesome. Mrs. Brisby is probably one of the most realistic “strong” (i.e., masculine) female characters you’d come across: she faces her fears to save her son and home, isn’t empowered, doesn’t bitch at the all-male rats or try to go toe-to-toe with them. And in a final blow to all the Thoroughly Modern Millies out there, we never know Mrs. Brisby’s first name: even after her husband’s death, she is still referred to as Mrs. Jonathan Brisby. Scary, foreboding, powerful characters and environments that aren’t evil, but just are. Jenner is a villain with an actual goal that isn’t boring large-scale destruction but the preservation of the rats he’s responsible for. The Secret of NIMH was followed up with a sequel, sans Bluth, that I refuse to see because there’s no way it could live up to its predecessor. Isn’t that how it usually works?

Titan A.E.
Don Bluth’s coffin nail, of sorts. This lost a lot of money at the box office, but I don’t think it deserved the bad luck. It was a decent alien invasion revenge story, and though the aliens themselves were pretty interesting in themselves, I had no sense of what they were after. They just wanted to blow stuff up for no reason, which they did, large-scale, within the first 5 minutes of the movie: they literally exploded Earth. The two tie-in novels that gave the backstory for the two protagonists didn’t explain any of the invaders’ motivations either.

The Beastmaster
Might be a Conan clone? It came out the same year, and I don’t feel like researching the development timeline of the two films. Anyways, while Arnold could be considered a roughly carved gargoyle for his characterization of Conan, Marc Singer’s Dar was more of a bare wooden plank with lots of knots. Uninteresting, but the story was okay.

Sol Levante
A short, Netflix-only story of a woman who does…something. I don’t really know what, but it was interesting to watch nonetheless. It was created using some new arcane wackadoo animation tech that I didn’t understand or have an interest in. The behind the scenes video of Sol Levante is longer than the animation itself.

2001: Space Odyssey
Kubrick’s bonkers sci-fi offering that was about, not space exploration, nor alien artifacts, nor homicidal computers, but mass media manipulation (tl;dw version: the monolith is a blank movie screen). Maybe it also implied that America’s first manned moon landing, and the space race as a whole, was faked to some degree.

A.I.: Artificial Intelligence
Pinocchio meets Asimov. Kubrick had a hand in making this, and some people thought the third act, particularly the ending, completely contradicted the rest of the movie. It’s really the opposite. The far-future beings that rescued David weren’t aliens but the androids from earth that had evolved enough to be much more intelligent and alien-like, and it was a sensible way to portray the type of world the preceded it.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
This movie, along with Atlantis: The Lost Kingdom, might have been the one of the largest modern introductions to the steampunk subgenre. The story started off okay but devolved into a “stop the madman” plot with no character development.

Bleach, Season 1: The Substitute
A teenager, partly by necessity and accident, is given shinigami (grim reaper) powers and is duty-bound to send souls to the afterlife properly, but he has to deal with the corrupted souls (Hollows) that cause issues in the human wold. Does a good job of setting up the afterlife lore and hinting at the mechanics of the shinigami weapons and powers before the second season, while also developing the main cast that will continue on. Bleach was created before popular anime adaptations got really graphic, so the over-the-top edginess isn’t there as in modern takes. Part of the trio of great, pre-2010 shonen anime series, alongside Fullmetal Alchemist and Naruto.

Ghost in the Shell, SAC_2045
Section 9 has regrouped as mercenaries in America, after the Great Global Default enables a “sustainable war” scenario as a means of keeping the world’s economy going. I had my doubts about this, partly because it was an all CGI take on a series that was traditionally (mostly) hand-drawn. I almost tapped out after the end of episode 2; the animation was full frame rate, not the kind that tries to imitate the “jitteriness” of hand-drawn animation, but it start to wear on me a bit. The comic relief newbie team member was a little too much, as well, but I think this was a case of me getting used to these things as the series progressed.

Demolition Man
Two criminals, who were put into cryogenic freezing to serve their sentence, are unfrozen in a peaceful, weapons-free future where swearing is the biggest official crime. This feels more like a comedy-action than serious sci-fi, but it does a good job of satirizing career moralists.